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Thursday, September 22, 2005

Last night, the University of Michigan officially opened its Detroit-based center in Midtown. The center - which will serve as an administrative hub for the more than 100 programs the university currently conducts in Detroit - contains offices, meeting space, and a small number of classrooms.Some of the programs that will be coordinated at the new Detroit location include:

The School of Art and Design's Detroit Connections project, in which art and design students work with local elementary schools.

The School of Education and the School of Engineering's Hi-Ce program (Highly Interactive Classrooms/Curricula/Computing in Education) which utilizes the skills of psychologists, computer scientists, researchers and educators, along with middle school teachers and administrators within the Detroit Public Schools system, aims to examine and promote educational reform through things like learner-centered technologies and inquiry-based curricula.

The School of Public Health's Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center, which seeks to promote community-based, participatory research to better the health and quality of life for families on Detroit's east and west sides, while helping to further research related to inner-city public health policies.

The Taubman Center for Architecture + Urban Planning's Detroit Design Charette, which is an annual design project that matches architecture students up with guest designers to explore and create unique projects that focus on various sections of Detroit.

The university's new Detroit location is on the bottom level of Orchestra Hall, which is located at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Woodward Avenue. Orchestra Hall is the home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, an internationally-acclaimed orchestra founded nearly a century ago in Detroit. The University of Michigan was founded in 1817 in Detroit and moved to Ann Arbor in 1837.